The Lord of Vik-lo: A Novel of Viking Age Ireland (The Norsemen Saga Book 3)

by James L. Nelson

  Goodbye, friend, Grimarr thought. The Valkyries will lift you up to your reward. So brave a death will not go unnoticed by the gods. For a long moment he looked at Fasti’s corpse, thought of all the adventures they had had fighting in their native Denmark, leaving to go a’viking three years ago. They had barely escaped when the Norwegians had taken Dubh-linn back from the Danes, had helped create the new longphort in Vík-ló.

  Now what by all the gods did you do with my treasure? Grimarr thought.

  Sandarr was at his side again. “That’s all the Irish overboard,” he said. “Let the sharks tear them apart. They may puke, but let them feast.”

  Grimarr nodded. “We’ll get our dead laid out. We can tow Sea Rider into Vík-ló, and then we’ll give them a proper send off. But first…”

  He pulled his eyes from Fasti and stepped around the forward side of the mast. A goodly part of the treasure had been stored under the deck planks there. They were not nailed down, but now there were three dead men lying athwart them.

  “Move these sorry bastards,” Grimarr ordered and the dead were pulled unceremoniously out of the way. “Lift those planks.”

  Eager hands grabbed at the edge of the pine boards because they all knew what Grimarr was looking for. As the planks came up, the watery sunlight filled the hold beneath. There was nothing there, nothing but an inch of sloshing blood and water.

  “Damn it! By Odin, damn it!” Grimarr said in frustration. Forward of that space was another, where more of the plunder had been stowed. They pulled the dead from those planks, hauled them up, found nothing there either.

  Grimarr frowned. Lorcan, he was sure, could not have removed the treasure in the time he had aboard. Had Fasti hidden it somewhere ashore? Why would he do that? Was Fasti planning on betraying him? That did not seem possible.

  There was one storage space left, and though Grimarr despaired of finding anything there he knew he had to look. Once again the dead were dragged clear and eager fingers reached for the deck planks.

  And then something beneath the deck moved.

  The men who had stepped up to remove the boards leapt back in surprise. Nervous eyes shot back and forth. They were standing in the midst of a slaughterhouse, dead men everywhere. They had just callously flung the corpses of the enemy over the side. Who knew what strange things from the spirit world might be crawling through the bowels of the ship?

  It knocked again, the thing below the deck, and the plank moved a fraction of an inch as whatever was down there became restless. The men, as one, took a big step back.

  “Ah! You are a bunch of old women!” Grimarr shouted and stepped forward despite his own terror which he was struggling to tamp down. He leaned over and grabbed the edge of the deck plank and the agony in his fingers blotted out any fear of what might be underneath. He pulled the plank up and flung it aside.

  It was no spirit, or if it was it was, it was one which had taken on a human form. A pleasing human form. A girl, filthy and cowering, her age indeterminate. She looked up from the narrow space and blinked in the light, and then she spoke. Irish. No one understood a word of it.

  Damn you, Fasti Magnisson, Grimarr thought. Damn your hide, what games are you playing with me?

  Sea Rider rolled in the swell and a cold breeze suddenly enveloped them like a breath from the grave. Grimarr felt the fear return. Was this Fasti, or the Irish come back to plague him? He looked out to windward. The sky in the east was black and ugly, the cold breeze the harbinger of foul weather coming. Bad weather, Grimarr thought. Storm’s coming up fast.

  “Very well,” he said out loud. “Get her out of there, she’s no spirit, just some sorry Irish thrall. Get a tow line on Sea Rider. Let’s get to Vík-ló before this damnable shit weather is upon us.”

  Chapter Three

  Before his billow-steed

  battle-bush Erik, tossed

  by the tempest, has seen

  more blue breakers back in the east.

  The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue

  Fifty sea miles to the north and east, that cold gust of wind that Grimarr Giant had felt, that chill that had brought to his mind images of the angry, displaced souls of the slain, caught the longship Far Voyager under full sail. The weather clew of her big red and white checked square sail was tacked down to the beitass, thrust out from the starboard side. The wind rolled her to leeward, and as she dipped her sheer strake a line of water spouts burst through the gaps between shields mounted on the larboard shield rack.

  Aft at the tiller, Thorgrim Night Wolf allowed the ship to pay off a bit to leeward, and she stood more upright in response to the subtle twist he gave to the steerboard. Thorgrim saw nothing supernatural in the cold blast. He was, to be sure, no less aware than his fellow Norsemen of the unseen world of spirits, trolls, demons, and the lurking horrors in the depths of the dark water, but he had been watching the storm building for hours on the eastern horizon and recognized this as the gust that heralds a change of weather.

  He turned his face into the wind, felt the breeze tugging at his beard, a dark beard, shot through with gray now. His hair, too, showed more and more white strands, as well it might, he having been on that earth for a bit more than four decades - four hard decades.

  Thorgrim’s father-in-law, Ornolf the Restless, stood just forward of the tiller, leaning on the weather rail, a drinking horn in hand. His long hair, mostly white but with vestiges of the original red still visible, was whipping off to leeward. Ornolf was roaring drunk.

  “See here!” he shouted, pointing with the horn toward the horizon. Mead sloshed over the deck and ran in rivulets down the boards and joined the sea water in the bilge. Lightning flashed far off under the thick layer of dark clouds to the east. “See here? Thor looks to kill me as soon as I put to sea! Hah! He has tried before, but my friend Ægir protects me! Why? Because Ægir is a god who protects men who know the use of the sea and the drinking horn, and I am such a man!”

  Ornolf drained the cup, tossed it to the deck, turned and began to climb up on the ship’s side. “You want me, Thor, you cowardly whore’s son?” he shouted. Thorgrim looked to the leeward side. His son, Harald, and Starri Deathless were seated with backs against the ship’s side. With the wind steady and the sail set and drawing, there was not much else for them to do. Luckily, Ornolf would not allow them to become bored.

  They met Thorgrim’s eyes and Thorgrim jerked his head in Ornolf’s direction. Harald and Starri were on their feet, each grabbing one of Ornolf’s arms and easing him down from the sheer strake he was trying to mount. “Here, Grandfather,” Harald said, “you’ll frighten Thor and make him piss his pants and I don’t care to think what would happen after that!”

  Grudgingly, Ornolf allowed himself to be pulled down from the rail and seated on a small bench. Starri retrieved the drinking horn and Harald grabbed up a wine skin still mostly full of mead and filled the horn, and that seemed to mollify the old man. Forward, the men huddled against the weather side turned their heads away as the drama came to an end, though their expressions were still dark. They did not care for Ornolf’s taunting the gods. Neither did Thorgrim.

  Some of the Far Voyagers were men who had sailed with Thorgrim and Ornolf from Vik a year and a half before, and they were accustomed to Ornolf’s behavior. But there were not too many of those left. Most of the ship’s company did not know the men from Vik well. They had joined the ship in Dubh-linn, having come there from every part of the Norse world, though Norway in the main. They joined because they were looking for a way back home, and because they had heard of Thorgrim Night Wolf and they wished to be part of his company.

  Another gust rolled the ship to leeward and Ornolf cursed as he spilled mead all over his tunic. He was not angry at wetting his tunic - it was soaked through already - but at spilling mead, a limited resource on board the ship. They had a long voyage ahead. Nearly a year and a half earlier he and Thorgrim, Harald and the others had sailed from Norway to go a’viking for the summer in Ireland.
That simple plan, however, had become vastly more complicated, as was wont to happen, and their return to Vik was now long overdue.

  Indeed, Thorgrim had come to suspect that the gods were toying with him. Time and again they dangled before him the prospect of a return to his farm in East Agder, the only thing in life he now desired, and then snatched it away. He wondered if perhaps he was being punished for Ornolf’s blasphemy. It would be no easy task for the gods to punish Ornolf, because even when he was sober, which was rare, he did not seem to care a rat’s ass what became of him. Vik, Dubh-linn, life, death, it did not seem to matter much to Ornolf as long as there were no restraints put upon his outrageous behavior. It would be terribly unfair, or course, for the gods to punish Thorgrim for Ornolf’s transgressions, but fairness was never a hallmark of those who dwelled in Asgard.

  Far Voyager’s last leeward roll had shipped enough water to set the men to bailing. With wooden bailers and buckets and the odd helmet they scooped water from the bilge and threw it over the larboard side. Thorgrim had been driving the ship hard, but he was pushing the limits now.

  “Let us put a reef in the sail!” he shouted forward. “Two reefs!” His voice was strong and it cut like a battle ax through the rising wind. For all the years and the hard usage, the sundry injuries he had sustained, some minor, some nearly fatal, his strength was not much diminished.

  He had only just recovered from the last, a knife wound that had nearly been the end of him. It had been delivered as they were plundering the church at a place called Tara, delivered by a fellow Northman who had fixed on the idea that Thorgrim was his enemy. They had carried Thorgrim to his ship and sailed him back to Dubh-linn. Cursed Dubh-linn, that Norse longphort, once just a foothold on the Irish coast, now the largest, richest city on the island. Dubh-linn, from where Thorgrim had tried time and again to escape only to have the gods fling him back at the city’s feet, on the muddy banks of the river Liffey.

  Thorgrim’s men had borne him up the plank road to the house where he and Harald and Starri had lived during the winter months. The house belonged to an Irishwoman named Almaith, Thorgrim’s lover, and widow of a Dane blacksmith. Almaith was a skilled healer, and as spring yielded to summer she nursed Thorgrim back to health. Or nearly back to health. His recovery was still not complete when the height of the summer passed, and the weather, fine by Irish standards, threatened to worsen, and Thorgrim knew if he was to sail for home that year he had to do so soon. It was time to go.

  Almaith had begged him not to sail, had assured him his strength was not what it should be. Thorgrim knew she was right, but he would not spend another winter in Dubh-linn. He would go to the bottom of the sea first.

  Which was now a genuine possibility if they did not reef the sail, and soon. Those men who were not bailing, or those who were sick of bailing, moved to the various lines that controlled the big square sail, bellying out hard from the yard above. They were experienced hands and needed no instructions on how to reef, no lessons on the proper way to tie up the bottom edge of the sail and reduce by half the amount of cloth spread to the wind.

  Men arrayed themselves along the foot of the sail, which was at chest height and hauled nearly fore and aft. Just forward of where Thorgrim stood at the tiller a man named Agnarr took the long halyard off its cleat. Agnarr was just a bit younger than Thorgrim, an experienced mariner who had been in Dubh-linn for several years. He had tried his hand at fishing off the Irish coast, a less lucrative endeavor than he had hoped, but from that experience he came to know the waters and the coastline well. He sailed with Thorgrim and the others to Tara and had proved himself a good man in the fighting. Now, like Thorgrim, he was ready now to return to Norway, and so had been pleased to join Far Voyager’s crew.

  Agnarr looked forward, saw all was ready. He took the halyard off the cleat to which it was made fast and eased the thick rope away until the sail bellied out in a great round arc to leeward, in a manner reminiscent of Ornolf’s gut. Fore and aft the men grabbed onto the sail, pulled it down to them, bundled up the bottom edge and tied it along its length with the short lines, the reef points, that were woven at intervals through the cloth. That done, a half a dozen men staggered aft and took up the halyard. With Agnarr calling the cadence they heaved on the line and hauled the yard back up, though with the sail shortened it now rose only half way up the mast.

  Thorgrim could feel the change in the ship’s motion. Before, Far Voyager had felt on the knife edge of control, like a skittish horse ready to bolt at any moment. Now she felt solid and ready to respond to the nuance of the steerboard. She felt ready to ride out the ugly weather coming, and that meant Thorgrim did as well.

  “Ha!” Ornolf shouted from his seat on the low bench. He wiped mead from his beard. “You are old women, the lot of you! To tuck a reef in the sail in this pathetic breeze? It would not be so if I was in command here!”

  “Of course not, Ornolf!” Thorgrim agreed. And he did not doubt Ornolf’s boast. Ornolf’s recklessness, which he called leadership, would have taken him, his ship and his men to the bottom two dozen times by then if Ornolf had not yielded the de facto command to Thorgrim years before.

  And now Thorgrim did not even have to pretend Ornolf was in command because for the first time in all their voyaging together, the ship belonged to Thorgrim. Not Ornolf. Thorgrim had taken it in battle and not even realized as much.

  It was all part of the great intrigue in which they had managed to tangle themselves. A hired crew of Danes had been sent to Dubh-linn to kidnap the young woman whom Thorgrim and Harald were protecting. The subsequent fight had left most of the Danes dead on the muddy roads by the banks of the Liffey. It had not occurred to Thorgrim that their ship would become his legitimate prize, not until Ornolf, claiming the prerogative of a father-in-law, had taken it for his own use.

  She was a relatively new vessel, well-built and seaworthy. She met with Thorgrim’s approval, which was no easy thing for a ship to do, as Thorgrim had strong opinions backed by the experience of the many, many miles of water that had passed beneath his keel. What the Danes had called her, he did not know, but he renamed her Far Voyager, because that was all he wished from her: to ride the seas back to his home in Vik.

  Far Voyager seemed a good ship, but not a perfect ship, so Thorgrim had made many changes to her before setting out for the last time from the harbor of Dubh-linn. He had stepped her mast a bit further after, added an additional shroud and altered the footing of the beitass. He would have liked to give her a somewhat wider sail with a deeper drop, but sails were not to be had in the Irish longphort. He had removed the thwarts on which the rowers sat, preferring to let the men sit on their own sea chests, lashed to the deck. He had given her a longer and wider steering board.

  Some of the changes had been more superficial but in Thorgrim’s mind at least no less important. Her hull had been oiled but Thorgrim had it scraped clean and coated with a mixture of tar and varnish for a black, gleaming appearance that he felt was more impervious to rot. The carvings at the stem and stern had been replaced. Thorgrim knew there was no dishonor in sailing a ship that had belonged to a man you killed, assuming you had killed him in fair and honorable combat - which Thorgrim had. Still, to leave that man’s carvings on the ship did not seem like a lucky thing to him.

  Dubh-linn had craftsmen aplenty, and it was no difficulty in finding a skilled carver who could make a new head, a winged sea-beast to adorn the bow with its tail at the stern to help Far Voyager in her long eastward passage, a figure that would cleave the waves ahead, part the water for his ship’s passage. And just to be sure luck and the gods would sail with them, Thorgrim had ordered three bullocks to be sacrificed on board and copious amounts of wine poured fore and aft.

  When at last Far Voyager had moved down the Liffey to the open sea she was a very different ship than the one Thorgrim had taken from the Danes. A better one, he reckoned. Twenty-four men pulled at the long oars, another twenty-eight stood ready to relive them, or
to set the sail on Thorgrim’s command. The ship was heavy laden with supplies, with the bounty they had taken from Tara, and with trade goods from the prolific craftsmen in Dubh-linn, goods which Thorgrim was sure would fetch a nice profit in his native Norway, or at some port en route.

  Now, ten hours later, Far Voyager’s bow rose to the seas, cresting the wave, knifing through it, twisting her way down into the trough. It was a pronounced motion, but not so bad, not as bad as it would get in a few hours as the storm built in intensity.

  Thorgrim looked back over his shoulder as the ship rose to the next wave. Ireland was a long, low dark line on the horizon, growing more obscure in the thickening weather. He had meant to stand offshore on a long board, tack and sail north westerly, arriving back on the coast near sundown, at a point well north of Dubh-linn, where they might beach for the night. He meant to work his way north along the coast until he reached the north-eastern-most point of land, and there cross the open water to England. They would then sail north around Scotland where he might hope to find welcome and refuge in the many Norse settlements along that coast.

  That was the plan. Now, ten hours into the voyage, it was all in jeopardy.

  The wind, which had some southing in it, had come more northerly over the past few hours, making it harder for Far Voyager to progress up the coast at all. The seas were building and Thorgrim could hear the pitch of the rising wind in his ears. The coast of Ireland was under their lee, the wind and seas threatening to pile the ship up on the killing rocks, and it was not so many hours until night came on. The most reasonable thing for Thorgrim to do was to turn and run for the safety of Dubh-linn, wait out the storm and begin the voyage again. But he was done with Dubh-linn, and would not even consider a return.